The Time of Slavery, an article by Saidiya Hartman. i read it at the beach yesterday, liked it a lot. there are still grains of sand in between the pages. yet in class everybody seems to agree that it is a very pessimistic piece. when walking a bit of the way home with one students, he tells how the text got on his nerves – her bourgeois indulgence in sentiments. he is a serious political theory student, into high theory and anarchism. and yes, i see what he means. but there is something in the way she works through what preoccupies and affects her that, precisey because she doesn’t claim an easy “working through” model, takes her readers to different places. coming to think about it, the consensus on the pessimism of the text strikes me as strange. to me it drew lines of hope.
her visit to Elimina Castle in Ghana (one of the places on the West-African coast from where enslaved Africans were merchandised to the Americas). she is addressed as a sister from the other side of the Atlantic, returning. she rejects the idea of “the return”, yet does not remain untouched by the address. “Dear Sister” pierces through the armor of my skepticism, which, like a scab covering a wound, is less the sign of recovery than it is a barrier against the still pulsating state of injury. Without this defense i am exposed and vulnerable, a naive woman on an impossible mission: the search for dead and forgotten kin. the seduction of “sister”, the banality. a placebo, a pretend cure for an irreparable injury.
the tour within the castle invokes reflections on the tourist industry feeding of injury, at times it infuriates her. yet when in the children’s dungeon women start crying, she recognizes something else going on, that exceeds the closures of tourism. When some of the women begin to cry. I am suprised since I have been unable to shed a single tear; moreover, this shoddy and sensationalist tour incites my anger, which seems the only emotion I can express with an ease. Yet watching these women, I realize that they have come here to act as witness.
remembering. the necessity. the traps. the time of remembering – the coevalance of then and how, of us and the dead. It would appear that our lives and even those of the dead depend on such acts of remembrance. Yet how best to remember the dead and represent the past is an issue fraught with difficulty, it not outright contention. The difficulty posed by the plaque’s injunction to remember is as much the faith it bespeaks in the redressive capacities of memory, as the confidence it betrays in the founding distinction or a break between then and now. For the distinction between the past and the present founders on the interminable grief engendered by slavery and its aftermath. How might we understand mourning, when the event had yet to end? When the injuries not only perdure, but are inflicted anew? Can one mourn what has yet ceased happening?
refusing the return, refusing a fantasy of origins. refusing the idea of repair, refusing that the injury and grief is whiped out by repair. The most disturbing aspect of these reenactments is the suggestion that the rupture of the Middle Passage is neither irreparable nor irrevocable but bridged by the tourist who acts as the vessel for the ancestor. […] The ease with which the “greatest crime against humanity” is invoked and instanteously eclipsed but the celebration of the return of those descendants of the Middle Passage would suggest that in the last instance the language of return acts to disavow the very violence that it purportedly gives voice to and insinuates that the derangements of the slave trade can be repaired.
mourning. it perils. and, she suggests (and i feel the classmates skipped over this), the beginning of a counterhistory. Mourning, a public experession of one’s grief, insists that the past is not yet over; this compulsion to grieve also indicates that liberal remedy has yet to be a solution to racist domination and inequality. […] Yet the work of mourning is not without its perils, chief among these are the slippage between responsibility and assimilation and witnessing and incorporation.
we talk about the difference between mourning and melancholia in class. in a text that might feel melancholic, her insistance on mourning is deliberate, as a footnote reference to Freud’s Mourning and Melancholia testifies. mourning as a reaction to the loss (of a person or an abstraction, like a motherland), and melancholia when you take the loss in yourself. it’s mourning that raises the question of ethical responsibility, that has a transformative power.
it also strikes me in this class, after listening generously and searching for places to connect, that i don’t like the way the students are trained here – in the sophisticated humanites. the things we read and talk about are disturbing, they affect… yet the students seem only in their comfort zones when talking in a well rehearsed theoretically sophisticated voice (which includes much talk about affects…), about representational strategies and all. so many times i feel like asking, now cut the crap, what exactely do you mean? the moments in between the well-rehearsed parts they seem so clueless…